According to Odaily, Elon Musk's xAI is sending engineers directly into the offices of potential corporate clients to poach customers from OpenAI and Anthropic PBC. This hands-on strategy has helped xAI win business from payments company Shift4 Payments. Shift4 CEO Taylor Lauber stated that the company plans to gradually phase out OpenAI's ChatGPT and switch to xAI's Grok, but will continue to use Anthropic's Claude for code development.
However, Shift4 is not a purely market-driven customer win. Its founder, Jared Isaacman, an ally of Elon Musk, completed the world's first commercial spacewalk aboard a SpaceX spacecraft and currently serves as NASA Administrator. SpaceX's Starlink is also a Shift4 customer. In the three years since xAI's founding, its customers have primarily been Musk's affiliated companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, as well as government agencies. Bloomberg points out that xAI's on-site deployment strategy reflects a general trend in the AI industry: OpenAI and Anthropic are also actively sending engineers to assist customers with deployments, and OpenAI is also partnering with private equity firms to establish a dedicated "deployment department." (Bloomberg)
